[Om3] OpenMath Symbols for Symbolic Computation

David Carlisle davidc at nag.co.uk
Wed Sep 10 17:35:52 CEST 2008



> (1) There is no reasonable representation for matrices.

we have

http://www.openmath.org/cd/linalg2.xhtml#matrix
for matrices given by row and
http://www.openmath.org/cd/linalg3.xhtml#matrix
for matrices given by column
and
http://www.openmath.org/cd/linalg5.xhtml
for various kinds of banded or triangular matrices.

Perhaps they are not reasonable, but it would be interesting to know
what you found wrong with them, or if you just didn't find them?


> (2) arith1.sum, calcucus1.diff etc. all take a function as a parameter.
>     There are several quirks with this:
>     * First, there ARE no functions in OM. From the examples I found  
> that this is referring to fns1.lambda-expressions.

It doesn't have to be a lambda expression, some terms naturally have
function type already, so you can apply diff to transc1.sin for example
you don't have to construct lambda x. sin(x).

However it is true that this is a pain in other contexts such as
aligning with MathML diff and int (which take expressions) and probably
we'll need to support both expression based and function based versions
of these.

> (3) prog1 doesn't really make me happy:

yes it's marked  "experimental" for a reason. It covered a very
simplistic algorithmic language enough for its original use case, but
most likely anyone needing to enkode algorithms will need to extend
this.


> (4) There are tons of stuff missing
That is of cause always going to be the case, the core cds can only ever
be a start, and people working in specific areas will need to add more,
however specific suggestions for new CDs and/or new symbols always
welcome...

> I don't want to gripe 
Not at all, it's good to see interest in updating and extending this
set.


David


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